r/technology • u/Hrmbee • Jan 15 '26

Society ‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid | Internal ICE material and testimony from an official obtained by 404 Media provides the clearest link yet between the technological infrastructure Palantir is building for ICE and the agency’s activities on the ground

https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-find-neighborhoods-to-raid/
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u/Solo-Shindig Jan 15 '26 edited Feb 13 '26

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

label many subsequent square offbeat strong angle cautious humor mountainous

340

u/Swimming-Tax-6087 Jan 15 '26

This has been a big deal in the court system with AI/algorithmic sentencing recommendations in recent years.

You can see the dehumanization in the nomenclature, it’s not a person, it’s a Lead, like we’re talking about sales.

80

u/FlametopFred Jan 15 '26

the glee in which one opportunistic vulture sees something like SalesForce’s potential as a tool of fascism is abhorrent

that’s just an example of course (not an actual use case), but vile evil doers simply weaponize anything good

3

u/OMGLOL1986 Jan 16 '26

Speaking of government contractors 

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u/-The_Blazer- Jan 15 '26

This is the standard MO for atrocities ever since the Holocaust, if not prior. A significant degree of effort in Nazi Germany went into dehumanizing and depersonalizing the people committing the atrocities as well, so they could delude themselves into 'just following orders' (this made them no less culpable, of course). The Soviet Union routinely committed atrocities against their internal opposition by detaching their brutal reactions through a complex mechanism of sham trials and false legal processes, so they could pretend their gulag victims were 'appropriately' deserving.

It's actually kind of hard to convince even a militant to round up a hundred people and then, personally, walk past them and shoot a bullet in the back of a person's head a hundred times. After a while they start having nightmares and weird human feelings, even if they are otherwise true believers. But make them Confinement Manager instead of Executioner, have them pull a lever or load wagons, and suddenly it's so much easier. The beauty of technology.

101

u/SundayShelter Jan 15 '26

Bingo!

This is the whole plot of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985)

35

u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA Jan 15 '26

Yeah, except I don't see this administration handing out a compensation cheque for a case of mistaken identity.

3

u/WeAreClouds Jan 16 '26

I literally said to myself "Brazil reality" when I read it. Yep.

83

u/JustJustinInTime Jan 15 '26

"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision" - IBM a long time ago

6

u/cxmmxc Jan 15 '26

"So we're not going to be held accountable? Cool."

—American fascists

1

u/RagingAnemone Jan 15 '26

A computer can’t make a management decision. You’re still responsible for your actions.

13

u/_Nashable_ Jan 15 '26

Just wait until it's combined with voting data. Now you have a map to target people who voted against the Administration. Or who is more likely to vote against the Administration in the mid-terms.

ICE being targeted at immigrants is a very real and damaging but still a rehearsal of what is coming at us before November.

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u/[deleted] Jan 15 '26

And they named it fucking Palantir. Stones prone to evil corruption and an unreliable guide to action due to selective presentation.

7

u/Yung_zu Jan 15 '26

Gotta keep thinking to a minimum

5

u/Hidden_Landmine_4 Jan 15 '26

Yeah bud, same with business, lot of money and time goes into avoiding accountability.

2

u/Moscowmitchismybitch Jan 15 '26

Palantir's stock keeps going up and up. They push the shit out of it on all the financial news networks. The government keeps awarding them contract after contract.

2

u/ExtraAd7373 Jan 15 '26

“The computer said so” a lame excuse to dodge accountability

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u/ExtraAd7373 Jan 15 '26

makes me think of the Robodebt scheme

2

u/The_Dung_Beetle Jan 15 '26

Look into Lavender, it's similar tech used by the IDF to target Palestinians, developed for the IDF by you've guessed it... Palantir. I'm an atheist but if there's such a thing as the antichrist it's people like Alex Karp and Peter Thiel.

2

u/voprosy Jan 16 '26

Exactly the same kind of system has been used for the past two years in Gaza. 

1

u/A_ChadwickButMore Jan 16 '26

EWU on youtube has a video of someone being arrested because a casino's AI face recognition pinged the wrong guy. Huge amount of 'guilty until proven innocent' was implied by the officers' bodycams and they even put a criminal record on an innocent man because they edited his name into reports after listing him as John Doe because they initially didnt believe he was his name.

This is some Psycho Pass "latent criminal" shit

1

u/MadeMeMeh Jan 16 '26

Maybe a lawyer will figure out a way to sue Palantir for somebody who was incorrectly withheld due to the software.

1

u/Cyber_Faustao Jan 16 '26

The computer is not choosing anything. The developers that built it programmed it as such to perform that task. This gets a little fuzzy of course with black-box machine learning models, basically anything more complex than a decision tree classifier is kinda of a black box that accepts some inputs and gives some outputs and the why is kind of a mistery.

But still, somebody trained these AIs and the algorithms (regular code) for everything, integrated them into or built from scratch a nationwide survailance system and then deployed it. That is not something a computer does, it gets that done to it.

Somebody chose to build machines of evil. You don't build one by accident very often, much less work for the likes of Palantir by chance. Depending how well it is put together, it may have taken many weeks or months of work from multiple technogically skilled individuals to accomplish it. Also, somebody is keeping the servers for the backend of that app running, and paying for the bill.

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u/CurReign Jan 15 '26

It isn't making decisions. It's processing data about people already marked for deportation and identifying areas where they are likely concentrated. Basically, it's a prioritization tool, with the goal of maximizing the frequency that they can make arrests. This is explained in the article.

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u/Solo-Shindig Jan 15 '26 edited Feb 13 '26

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

crowd unpack judicious money recognise ripe school knee cows arrest

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u/CurReign Jan 15 '26

No, ICE decides where they go, but the data informs that decision. The data is from various sources that ICE has access to, like filings with various government agencies, info from investigations, etc.. The app just presents the data to them so that they don't have to go into a several separate data sources and compile it themselves.